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or many centuries the Himalayan mountain country of Tibet has borne mute testimony to a daily ritual. Several times a day, at the appointed hour, a curious barrel-shaped cylinder, fashioned of precious metal or wood and inscribed with prayers intended for Buddha, is rotated by means of a simple hand crank. The monks who conduct this ritual believe that each turn of the wheel is the equivalent of all the prayers of the order recited in succession. Accordingly, in the course of 2000 years, gears, waterpower, and even electric motors have been added to the device in order to maximize its devotional efficiency.
Side-stepping such obvious religious parallels as the reciting of 'Hail Marys' or the counting of Rosary beads, the Hindu prayer wheel is a paradigm of man's tendency to externalize values. For if the efficacy of prayer resides in the insensible symbols that document it, what purpose does the recitation serve? If the potency of a communication to a deity is a function of its repetition, of what value are the pious supplicants who turn the crank?
The invention of the prayer wheel has contributed little to technology. It does, however, bring to mind a modern day counterpart—namely, the spinning disc used to store and retrieve information intended not for deities but for the advancement of human knowledge. With today's digital computers, more information has been processed in the last decade than was printed throughout all previous history. Only mechanical contrivances can deal with intelligence of this magnitude; so we now have computers teaching computers! As you read this, nanotechnologists are working feverishly to develop an electro-mechanical brain with the ability to "think", convinced that it is the best hope for the survival of civilization. Some actually believe that it is only a matter of time before computers will acquire emotional sensibility!
Having abandoned the quest for meaning, mankind is rushing headlong toward a future in which machines will make the critical decisions that affect human life. Awed by their modern Leviathan, people seem only capable of getting in the way. Indeed, the human individual is the most inefficient and unreliable component in the system. In the name of progress, perhaps he should—as a gesture of his natural compassion—simply retire from the scene and allow the cybernauts free reign. Scientists will of course deny that this is their intention; but look where the last two decades of "technological progress" has taken them—in vitro conception, genetic engineering, human cloning, bionic body parts, computer chip implants, cryonic entombment. It is a strange new prayer wheel, indeed, this digital brain trust! But is a hi-tech paradise populated with mechanical surrogates fit to become the new Garden of Eden? Does it embody the kind of world we want as a legacy for our children? If not, how do we fix what's wrong with the concept?
There is a prevailing attitude in our society that technology will one day solve all problems. The idea is a corruption of Darwin/Marxist theories with a dose of altruism thrown in that smacks more of Disney than reality. It is predicated on the notion that we in the Western World have evolved a more "cerebral" culture than the under-developed nations where life is still largely a material struggle for survival, and that a "cybernetically enhanced" man is the logical next step in this evolutionary process. In a 2004 Philadelphia Inquirer commentary, John Timpane muses on the disturbing prospects of current research aimed at "custom designing" consciousness.
A future generation will have to deal with this notion—a designer consciousness. ...All this new neurobiology can make people feel as if they are being turned into machines or hunks of baloney. That the romance of the individual life—all that delicious richness, the things that paint the one-of-a-kind portrait of myself and yourself—is gone. That the soul is no more.1The 1990s, dubbed "The Decade of the Brain" by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, was a true explosion of intellectual vigor and research breakthroughs. ...Yet at the end of that wonderful decade, the grand quarry—consciousness itself—had eluded us. We still do not know how you get from a firing cell to a subjective experience. It will take us a while to build that bridge. (What a lovely paradox: that something so near to us, so obvious a fact, so familiar and intimate—should also be so elusive. Well did the Greeks assign an ancient word for butterfly—psyche—to the soul or mind. Beautiful, super-real, hard to catch.) But the net is poised. Someday, we may be able to head off diseases and disorders of the brain ranging from depression to Alzheimer's. We may be able to change and improve not only my mood, but also my ability to learn, understand, and remember; perhaps my memory(ies). And if you can do all that to me, where or what is the "I"?
A number of respected technological pioneers, including Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, have predicted the coming of "The Singularity", a computational intelligence that will, in the next two or three decades, not only match but swiftly surpass human intelligence. At that point, they say, civilization will be radically transformed in ways that our puny minds cannot possibly imagine.
The truth of the matter is that artificial intelligence does not have the capacity to replace man's intellect or memory, any more than the "gift" of technology can pacify the backward nations, or than genome building blocks can create a superior species of Homo sapiens. Without consciousness there can be no experience of reality, and "insensible knowledge" is a meaningless absurdity. Even if the technicians succeed in producing a mechanical system with the ability to "learn" as well as process information, including sufficient cognitive behavior to simulate "self-awareness", it will not be a conscious entity. By the same token, microchip attachments and memory data recorded from living brains will never extend man's consciousness beyond his finite lifetime or grant him immortality. However well intentioned and ingenious such efforts may be, the very notion that technology will eventually "upgrade" the biology, intelligence and conduct of man has already diminished the value of human life.
Although the technocrats argue that the miracles of modern technology are freeing mankind for "greater enrichment from higher pursuits," I have seen no evidence to support this view. To the contrary, I believe a case could be made that technology has replaced religion as the new opiate of the masses. The advancements of technology have raised our standard of living with a host of disposable conveniences that have all but eliminated the craftsmanship that was once a hallmark of human creativity, forcing our dependence on elusive specialists to operate or maintain them. Such "conveniences" even threaten to impugn the value of an education: a recent NEWSWEEK cover story reported that fully three-quarters of America's high-school students admit to cheating on exams, many using hand-held electronic devices to retrieve test data; so that a diploma may soon be worth no more than the paper it is printed on. Technology has landed man on the moon, launched satellites to Mars and Jupiter, and produced weapons of unprecedented destructive power at the cost of billions of our tax dollars and two manned space-shuttle disasters. Most alarming, it has fostered a self-serving goal for human progress based on a doctrine that says: "If it's technologically feasible, we've got to do it".
One eminent British astronomer notes that "Science is advancing in a far more unpredictable and potentially dangerous pattern than ever before."2 He calculates the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking earth at about 50 percent, up from 20 percent a century ago—not because of asteroid collisions or other natural calamities but primarily due to man-made threats of nuclear terrorism, deadly engineered viruses, rogue machines, and genetic engineering designed to alter human character. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." It seems to me that before we are reduced to mere road-kill under this technological wheel, we need to pause for a critical assessment of where we are heading—and why.
It can be said without exaggeration that throughout all of history, the single, most significant shortcoming of mankind has been his failure to recognize the value of individual freedom. Over the course of 6000 years human beings have been subject to the rule of tribal chieftains, patriarchal monarchs, feudal warlords, divine right sovereigns, autocratic dictators, theocratic statehoods, and military juntas, man's experience with representative democracy having been limited to little more than two centuries. In the absence of a plausible belief system that would, once and for all, release the individual from bondage to external authority and the need to appease an anthropomorphic "Being", man is by and large still ignorant of the fact that he alone is responsible for his actions and for his relationships with others. As a consequence, arrogance and superstition continue to be the driving forces in the conduct of global affairs—a fatalistic agenda that, fueled by runaway technology and international arms dealing, has pushed our civilized world to the brink of total annihilation.
If we are to set a new course for mankind, it must encompass an understanding of the human position—especially with regard to existential Freedom—and it must be based upon philosophical insight that is both credible and vital to the individual. Toward this objective, I offer the following set of axiomatic principles that conceivably could become the watershed for a value-based philosophy of Essence. These concepts are drawn from eclectic sources that express what I believe to be some of the most profound insights of philosophers and visionaries throughout the ages. As a coherent ontology, they invite a valuistic conception of reality from which may spring a credo worthy of our troubled new millennium.
First, and foremost . . .
To look at the world as the philosopher does, you must be prepared to tackle some fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the most difficult of which can be expressed in just two words: what is? This is the essential question. Once the basis for a branch of philosophy known as Metaphysics, the quest for a quintessential element—the Kantian "thing-in-itself"—has lately fallen under the domain of Quantum Physics. While it is unlikely that you would find a metaphysicist today to help you in this quest, answers have not been exactly forthcoming from the scientists, either.
The philosopher's search for Essence can't be satisfied by the discovery of an ultimate particle or energy wave source in the objective world. Since metaphysical truth must hold for "all possible worlds", the search is necessarily subjective in approach; it involves the positing of a plausible theory expounding the universal nature or "whatness" of existing things, and coming up with valid arguments to support it. The philosophical challenge is made all the more daunting by the apparent duality of the natural world—a paradox that science is not obliged to explain. Because the human "mind" is an elusive entity that defies quantification, it is inimical to science and considered an unavoidable artifact in objective research. Mind vs. matter is, nonetheless, an ontological schism that cuts across every observation of physical phenomena, every set of moral principles, every assessment of man's place in the universe. Trying to understand reality by searching only for objective information is the equivalent of one hand clapping. The philosopher strives to get beyond empirical "otherness" for an understanding of reality itself. For Western philosophers prior to the twentieth century, this was seen as a goal that could only be achieved by reducing reality to a monism; that is, by rejecting either the subjective idealism of Plato or the objective materialism of Science.
As if to rid the world of subjective reality, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel established the school of dialectical materialism in the mid-1800s. Their atheistic platform was adopted as the ontological basis for the Existentialist movement in the following century and, under the guise of Naturalism and Logical Positivism, has profoundly influenced our view of physical reality ever since. Here is how Dagobert Runes summarized the basic principles of dialectical materialism:
Ontologically, its materialism means that matter, nature, the observable world is taken 'without reservations' as real in its own right, neither deriving its reality from any supernatural or transcendental source, nor dependent for its existence on the mind of man. It is considered scientifically evident that matter is prior to mind both temporally and logically in the sense that mind never appears except as an outgrowth of matter, and must be explained accordingly. Space and time are viewed as forms of the existence of matter.3
With this "intellectual manifesto" as their foundation, philosophers at the turn of the century began to shackle subjectivity to man's materialistic zeitgeist. After thousands of years of wrangling over mind and matter, they finally seemed to be nearing a solution to the duality problem. While nuclear physicists found themselves facing some mind/matter issues of their own, a handful of philosophers were formulating the major premises of an alternative reality concept that was to be called "Existentialism". Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and Martin Heidegger, in particular, independently established philosophical grounds for an "experience-based" cosmology that would consolidate mind and matter as the two existential modalities of a single Being.
Science and philosophy have always operated on the assumption that Being is the essence of reality and that the properties of existing things are the key to this essence. The existentialists reasoned that, since consciousness has no basis in substantive reality other than contributing to its outcome [facticity], the anomalous split between mind and matter could be skirted simply by defining all reality as being and the essence of a person or thing, what it be-comes in the physical world [Heidegger's Dasein]. They would focus on the qualitative properties of Being as experienced, leaving the so-called physical properties—size, weight, mass, density, etc.—as grist for the mill of scientific research. (These are mainly empirical data used to quantify a phenomenon and communicate exactly what is observed to others within a universally verifiable scheme of things.)
It apparently did not occur to the existentialists that, while the experience of a phenomenon enables us to identify its type or species, it provides no direct knowledge of its essence or beingness. Cognizant awareness is the cumulative effect of varying intensities of nerve energy generated by sense receptors throughout the body and transmitted to the brain, which then interprets this information as conscious experience. Obviously, some extracorporeal stimulus is responsible for initiating a particular experience. But the physical apparatus by which we sense everyday experience is proprioceptive, which means that what we are actually sensing are the responses of our own cerebro-nervous system.
Let me bring this idea down to earth with an ordinary garden variety illustration.
There is a rose growing in my garden. I say that the rose "is", meaning that it exists and has being; but do I actually know this for a fact? I could be wrong about the species, of course, having only a smattering of botanical knowledge. But a rose by any other name is still a rose to me, and this particular flower happens to exhibit a set of characteristics that matches the description of every other rose in my memory. I also judge the object of my perception to be a "physical reality" because I can support my visual impression of it with related sensory data. But of what are such data composed?
Cupping the delicate blossom in my hand, I study the flower's crimson petals; but the color, shape and texture that I am experiencing are not attributes of the rose itself but of my visual and tactile sensory faculties. The familiar sweet fragrance I sense in its presence is, in actuality, a chemical alteration between my olfactory nerve endings that recalls past encounters with roses from my memory. I stoop to pluck the flower but am stopped by the prickly thorns of its stem; the pain I feel—a result of the traumatized condition of the nerves in my fingertips when the skin is pierced—is a further reminder that, except for the presumed being of this living plant before me, all of its identifiable attributes are actually properties of my organic sensibility. Thus, the flower whose existence I so confidently and without hesitation reported a moment ago on analysis turns out to be the mere spectre of a rose—a concoction of my own proprietary awareness. I do not even know for a certainty that what I've called a rose has a being of its own that is distinct from my cognizance of it!
Now I may try to corroborate the existence of the rose by inviting my wife to the garden and asking her to confirm it. But what she perceives will be her own set of sensory data relative to what is, in effect, another experience. Since I have no direct access to her sense impressions or values, we can only compare our observations verbally, in a very general way. Likewise, the form of the rose and its physical position among the other plants in the garden may be described, sketched or photographed to provide additional evidence of its existence. But these abstract "proofs" do not validate its "being" any more than self-awareness validates my own. Physical things like houses and stones—even living trees and flowers—are dimensional phenomena that relate to space and time in an objective world, not to being as such. Their supposed being is a consequence of their being experienced. And the tools we employ to confirm their existence will always produce data consistent with our experience because that is what they were designed to do.
Existentialism also holds that the being of existence is primary to its essence, a throwback to mechanistic philosophies that rejected valuism as a general concept, and individual human values in particular. The idea that "Existence precedes Essence" figures prominently in the atheistic theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw it as the reason that man is "condemned to freedom" in a deterministic universe without meaning. As a free agent, man is "thrown into existence" without the predetermined nature of other animals and is forced to "create his own essence" through the exercise of free choice—a project that is completed by his demise. Popularized in plays and novels by the leading twentieth century existentialist and his successors, this pessimistic world-view fostered a collective society that would come to regard human freedom as a "dreadful burden" and the individual's essence as a posthumous object for others.
Actually, the existentialists have been addressing only the phenomenal half of the mind/matter dilemma, and the "being" they have defined is "evolutionary in Nature" rather than a metaphysical absolute. As for the individual whose mind it is that experiences being, it is their contention that he or she is no more than "an accident of chance". Considering the fact that everything knowable about the universe is experiential, it is ludicrous to suggest (as Sartre did) that man is "unnecessary" inasmuch as "...the world exists just as well without him." The primary attribute of the material world—its apparent being apart from cognizant awareness—is itself an intellectual phenomenon. That makes man a sine qua non for the existence of differentiated reality. We can only speculate as to the nature of an objective world without sensible awareness, except that it would be meaningless.
The bottom line is that we can know only what we can experience. Even facts and descriptions that come to us second-hand—from textbooks and lectures, for example—originate as sensory values in someone's experience and are filed away in our memory bank as if they were directly experienced. In truth, nothing can be said to exist that is not capable of being experienced. This implies that not only our image of the world but the nature of reality itself may be experiential, in which case the brain functions as an effectual mechanism to create the experience, rather than simply reacting (affectively) to pre-existing external stimuli. Despite existentialist views to the contrary, a critical understanding of experience leads to the conclusion that the essence of reality is implicit in its values rather than its physical "beingness", and that value sensibility must therefore precede material existence.
All of which begs the question: What is the essence of reality, and how does it prompt us to conjure up the multiform images of things that we call existence? Furthermore, if it is true that the experience of our world is totally dependent on sensibility, what proof do we have that our experience of existence represents reality as it actually is? Or, for that matter, how do we know that the physical world exists at all? In an attempt to search for answers, empirical evidence is being collected and analyzed daily. But as advanced technology and more sophisticated instruments push the boundaries of man's observable universe ever further beyond the finite range of his senses and into the micro/macro realms of the cosmos, the evidence gets fuzzy, and his long-trusted laws of physics become less and less reliable. It is a most significant fact, I think—and perhaps even a fundamental law of Nature—that man's ability to validate reality is limited to the realm of finite perception. Nobel winning theoretical physicist Max Planck had nailed the problem over a century before when he said: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery in nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we try to solve."
Soviet-born cybernetics engineer Valentin Turchin is one of several contemporary physicists who have openly admitted to the challenge that now confronts the scientific investigator. These comments, appearing in an early essay Dr. Turchin wrote for the web site of his Principia Cybernetica Project, provide some historical perspective on science's changing world view.
The world of the nineteenth century was, broadly, as follows. Very small particles of matter move about in virtually empty three-dimensional space. These particles act on one another with forces which are uniquely determined by their positioning and velocities. The forces of interaction, in their turn, uniquely determine, in accordance with Newton's laws, the subsequent movement of particles. Thus each subsequent state of the world is determined, in a unique way, by its preceding state. ...In such a world there was no room for freedom: it was illusory. Humans, themselves merely aggregates of particles, had as much freedom as wound-up watch mechanisms.
In the twentieth century the scientific worldview has undergone a radical change. ...We now know that the notion that the world is ''really'' space in which small particles move along definite trajectories is illusory: it is contradicted by experimental facts. We also know that determinism, i.e., the notion that in the last analysis all events in the world must have specific causes, is illusory too. On the contrary, freedom, which was banned from the science of the nineteenth century as an illusion, became a part, if not the essence, of reality.4
As the cyber-technicians toy with an objective world that has been "liberated" from Newton's laws, nuclear physicists and cosmologists are beginning to realize that the properties of time and space are contingent upon the mode of experience itself. Faced with paradoxes such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, basic incompatibilities between quantum theory and relativity, and the absence of empirical validation for exotic new "unification" theories, they now concede that the universal dimensions by which objective entities have historically been measured and categorized no longer constitute legitimate ground for an external reality. This lends credence to the view that reality is essentially subjective, that the limits and properties of the physical world are defined by the limits and properties of perceptual awareness; which is to say, existence is the content of awareness. Thus, even within the scientific community, there is a small but growing consensus that the world begins and ends as cognizant experience. Or, as Tolstoy once observed, "There is no reality except for our experience of it".
How can this be so?
Recently, astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler,
a former colleague of Albert Einstein who is credited with naming cosmology's black hole, expressed the idea that "...what we say about the universe as a whole depends on the means we use to observe it, [that] in the act of observing we bring into being something of what we see. Laws of physics relate to man, the observer, more closely than anyone has thought before. The universe is not 'out there', somewhere, independent of us." Wheeler concludes: "Simply put: without an observer, there are no laws of physics."5 [Italics mine]
Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde takes Wheeler's idea to the next level, maintaining that the universe and the observer must exist as a pair. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there," he says; "The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."6 [Italics mine]
In other words, the universe is the way it is because we experience it. The essence of reality is not a property of the physical world but a creative wellspring that is more integral to the act of observing than to the externalities perceived. Indeed, the shocking truth about reality may be that there is no "out there", that everything we experience as occurring in time and space is actually happening within us, its outward manifestation being a product of our neurological sensibilities and a "universal pattern" that is innate to cognizant awareness.
Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California and author of Visual Intelligence, has declared his belief in a conscious reality: "I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe, but have always been, from the beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. ...If this be right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant minds, there is as yet no physical theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter and energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience."7
Now the concept of a subjective reality has always been fraught with controversy. It flies in the face of empirical objectivists for whom it has been remarked that "statistics" may be the closest thing to ultimate reality*, and it totally refutes Sartre's hypothesis that existence precedes essence. Further, to embrace the premise is to change the fundamental search for cosmic truth from: What is the nature of the universe? to: What is the essence of experience? I submit that only a revival of Essentialism, long abandoned because of its solipsistic implications, can provide mankind with a proper philosophical foundation from which to direct human energy. Only then will we have the insight to know what is to be gained by relentlessly pushing technology to its limits, as opposed to some other alternative.Just what is Essentialism?
The physical world is not only diverse and differentiated, but its differentiation in many respects constitutes a polarized system. We observe this polarity in the charged protons and electrons in the micro-world of nuclear physics, and we see it in the macro-world of Nature where the seasons come and go, the tides rise and fall, electro-magnetic particles are attracted and repulsed, biological processes are anabolic and catabolic, and living organisms are born and then die. The values we experience are virtually a study in contrasts—a balance of pleasure and pain, goodness and evil, beauty and ugliness, desire and repugnance, harmony and dissonance, and so on. Even the cultural advances of civilized societies are viewed as man's attempts to make order out of chaos. Indeed, the "law of contradictions" is so prevalent that one can almost regard experience as "contrariety personified".
The idea of a Primary Source turns this transitional pluralistic world of experience upside down. In philosophy, whether it is identified as the Absolute, God, or The One, the primary source is traditionally alleged to be unified, undifferentiated, and unalterable. If we assume this to be true, then it follows that the "first principle"—primary reality— is the opposite of polarized multiplicity. In other words, Essence can be defined as that state or mode of reality in which there is no opposition—where "plus equals minus" and contrariety disappears. (This definition will be given further elaboration in the Creation hypothesis of section six.) I call this primary state Essence and will treat it in this thesis as the "non-contradictory first principle."The word "essence", from the Latin esse [to be], is commonly used to reference the significance or core meaning of a proposition, as well as the value or substantive nature of a thing. Essence is not being, which is subtended by dimensional nothingness, nor is it conscious awareness, which presupposes an objective referent; rather, it is the absolute unity which encompasses all being and sensibility as the antithesis of existential nothingness. The descriptive form "essential" connotes what is indispensable in any context. Both terms have had a long and convoluted past in the history of philosophical dialogue. Much of the difficulty might have been avoided had philosophers fully understood the experiential component of the reality they were attempting to define. In light of recent findings by Professor Wheeler and other cosmologists, philosophers are no longer pariahs for denouncing as "problematic" any theory of reality that ignores proprietary sensibility or that posits Being as the primary cause.
I decided to call this value-based essence philosophy "Essentialism" back in the mid-1960s, a decade at least before the term began to identify a slew of polemical movements that have little if anything to do with metaphysical Essence and, in fact, are more derivative of existentialist thinking. Most of the definitions that have since found their way into college outline books and onto the Internet are slanted toward the idea that some things have essences which, if removed, would make their existence impossible. Curiously, Runes' comprehensive Dictionary of Philosophy still does not include Essentialism, but it does provide this "scholastic definition" for Essence: "The essence of a thing is its nature considered independently of its existence. Also, non-existent things and those which cannot exist at all have a proper essence. ...It is doubtful whether we can give of any thing a truly essential definition with the one exception of man: man is a rational animal."3
In its broadest sense, Essentialism is any philosophy that acknowledges the primacy of Essence. Many view it as an idealistic belief system with roots that are traceable to the objective idealism of the early Greeks. Others, myself included, see it as an inevitable reaction to scientific materialism which in its methodological denial of subjective reality has virtually rejected the possibility of an immanent Essence. To the scientist everything is an "other" whose attributes are defined and measured in terms of laws constructed by the human intellect—a not other. But because Essentialism is a conceptual worldview that is not dependent on objective facts and measurements, it is not limited to the scientific way of looking at things. As the Eastern mystics have known for many centuries, reality is more than what the rational mind can formulate differentially from its empirical observations of "otherness". Essentialism puts this wisdom into an ontological synthesis that is approachable (arguably for the first time) by the Western mind. The Essentialist's perspective is not trapped by self/other dualism; it reaches beyond otherness for the Value of undivided Essence—the ineffable Oneness of Eastern Philosophy.
Despite the metaphysical basis for the term, academicians in science, art, heuristics, psychology, and gender-based sociological studies have all seen fit to advance their disparate and sundry causes under the banner of Essentialism. Possibly the clearest definition for this philosophy was offered by gay/lesbian rights advocate Diana Fuss, who wrote: "Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity." [Essentially Speaking, 1989] Compare this belief with the tenets of dialectical materialism above, and you will see why Essentialism stands diametrically opposed to materialism.
Although the Greek philosophers believed that the true nature of the universe was perfect, they were astute enough to attribute the observed imperfections to man's limited perception. For Plato, this meant that there had to be two different realities: the "essential" and the "perceived". Plato's dialectical protégé Aristotle [384-322 B.C.] applied the term "essence" to the one common characteristic that all things belonging to a particular category have in common and without which they could not be members of that category; hence, the idea of rationality as the essence of man. This notion carried over into all facets of reality, including species of living creatures.
But it was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus [270-204 B.C.] who brought Greek Idealism to the Roman Empire as Neo-Platonism, and with it the concept that all existents emanate from a "subjective essence" and that the mind plays an active role in shaping or ordering the objects of its perception, rather than passively receiving the data of sensory experience. With the Empire's fall to the Goths in A.D. 476, Neo-Platonism gave way to the spread of Christianity in the Western World, leaving Aristotle's empirical definition of essence unchallenged to dominate philosophical thought throughout the Middle Ages.
When Darwin introduced his theory of Descent with Modification, he repudiated the Aristotelian essence by maintaining that diversity was an intrinsic and real aspect of nature, and that not only could deviations in a species affect the survival of individuals in a population but such changes could lead to the creation of a wholly new species. Once the scientific community caught hold of evolution as an on-going process of the natural world, Essence as a philosophical metaphor for Nature was replaced by deterministic theories that accommodate the reality perceived. This has allowed for a dynamic cosmos regulated by arbitrarily imposed laws of Nature whose source remains inexplicable and whose functions are only coincidentally related to the creative process—an anachronism rare in the annals of science.
But now Brian Ellis, a scientific philosopher at the University of Melbourne who typifies the self-proclaimed New Essentialists, is calling for "...the implementation of a new kind of realism in philosophical analysis." The central concept of his recently published treatise on Scientific Essentialism is that the properties of things determine the physical laws that apply, as opposed to the accepted inverse notion. "According to scientific essentialism," Ellis says, "all things are essentially active and reactive. At the most basic level, what they are intrinsically disposed to do is what makes them the kinds of things they are. ...If this thesis of scientific essentialism is correct, then the laws of nature are not contingent, as nearly everyone else supposes, but metaphysically necessary, and hence true in all possible worlds. ...The fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things that are said to operate and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed on the world by God, the forces of nature, or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world."8
Whether some sort of Neo-Platonism will eventually re-emerge as a philosophic platform for science is debatable; however, while these examples are a far cry from Plato's subjective World of Ideas, the fact that a few bold scientists are revisiting the essentialist ideas of classical philosophy is a step in the right direction.
In his present course, man seems determined to make himself a tool of his tools. Perhaps this was anticipated by Socrates' admonishment: "Know thyself ...the unexamined life is not worth living."
(We'll explore self-awareness later in this discussion.) As for our cognizance of a world "outside of" ourselves, we know things by their appearances, that is, by the perceptible qualities that manifest their being. We have contact only with the boundaries or surfaces of things, never with being itself. One might say that we are attracted to the cleavage rather than to the substantive being of the "beholden". Reality for us is separated from self-awareness by its very mode of being other, and from every particular other by a barrier that is, in part at least, intellectual.
You can draw your own conclusion as to whether the physical world is a substantive or a "virtual" reality. Of more importance to the Essentialist is the Value of that reality and its relevance to Freedom and meaning in the life experience. So that you may approach our philosophy unfettered by scientific hubris, it will be my purpose in this thesis to take Essence out of the context of Being entirely (except for my Creation hypothesis) and present it as the absolute and necessary Source from which existence and all of its perceived entities and attributes—material, emotional and intellectual—are derived.
*[Not surprisingly, most people are uncomfortable dealing with metaphysical theories which, by their nature, tend to be intuitive and lead to conclusions that may defy empirical evidence. Scientists, in particular, are trained to reject information that cannot be expressed in numbers or equations, or that is incapable of experimental confirmation. Because reality for the scientist is limited to observable phenomena that are measurable in units of time and space, philosophers are often unfairly criticized for attempting to resolve the "unanswerable" questions of scientific investigation on the basis of sheer speculation. While it is true that speculation plays a role in the intuitive approach, so do logic and reason; and the difference in methodology does not make the philosopher's insight any less credible than that of the scientist when it comes to forming a concept of reality. Nor should our perspective necessarily be restricted to things and events that can be quantified or made to conform to pre-determined parameters. Lest this "expanded" reality perspective cause you to dismiss Essentialism as hopelessly implausible, it is suggested that you regard these postulates as "suppositional" until you've had sufficient opportunity to reflect on the cosmology as a whole. And please keep an open mind as you do so.]
Contrary to what our senses tell us, the primary attribute of existence is not Being but Difference, and the primary difference is not between mind and matter but between proprietary sensibility and insentient otherness. For something "to be" it must first be differentially perceptible to an observer as a finite other. When we perceive a thing, we are introduced to a signature set of sensible values that are intellectually configurable to form a conscious entity. Only after the thing has been "objectivized" as a formed image in consciousness is it recognized as a particular "being". The theory of objectivization—"effectual intellection" (as I prefer to call it), or "introjection" as it was named by Avenarius who redefined it in the 1880s—relates to the cognitive process whereby certain sensations perceived by the central nervous system are represented as concrete images in consciousness. Because intellectual sensibility is activated principally by changes perceived in the environment, difference is a major stimulus in our acquisition of knowledge.
The human intellect is instinctively attracted to even the most subtle variation or change perceived in the experienced world, with interest focusing mainly on values relative to these differences. The precept of difference is, in fact, the basis for all learning; it is how infants learn to recognize their parents' faces, how molecular chemists go about developing specialty materials, and how artists and musicians continually manage to reach new heights in creative expression. In addition to its role in making man the "discriminating" species, difference experienced as variety and motion is now known to play a key role in stimulating the endorphins associated with brain activity.
The most basic difference in human experience is the division between the conscious proprietary self and the objective world outside it. Consider this introspective statement from the Principles of Psychology by William James: "One great splitting of the whole universe is made by each of us, and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves: but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we call the two halves by the same names, and that these names are 'me' and 'not-me', respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean."
Thus, we have proximate knowledge of our own physical organism; but this, too, is separated from our proprietary awareness, although "carried around with us" for a lifetime. It is, in fact, the vehicle through which sensibility is made possible. It is also that manifestation of our subjective self which serves as an object for others and by which we separate the "now/then" and "here/there" of space/time experience. Inasmuch as difference is the mediator for the experience of reality, what do we know about its nature and origin?
To divide a circle in half, one describes a line through the axis connecting the periphery. Geometrically, of course, the diameter has no dimensions—it is a nothingness. Yet its "presence" creates something new and different: a pair of semicircles. This delimiting or differentiating process applies to all experienced phenomena. Every object and event in nature is separated from every other by the nothingness between them. Since everything that has "being" is differentiated by nothingness, and being is what we call "reality", without nothingness our reality could not exist.
Blaisé Pascal was probably the first to consider nothingness a metaphysical reality. He likened it to that Great Divide between the infinitesimal and the infinite without which there could be neither relations nor a self to contemplate them. So intense was Pascal's fascination with nothingness that he constructed a crude column barometer in 1648. Although he set out to prove that nothingness was an empirical reality, his experiments coincidentally proved the reverse. The level of mercury in the column is determined by atmospheric pressure rather than by the nothingness of a vacuum, which was previously believed.
How "real" is Finitude?
There is an old adage that, to the best of my recollection, goes like this: 'Tis a long road that sees no turnings. To me, it implies that the longer a road is, the less discernable are its "crooks" or turns. I wrestled with this concept one fine spring day as a youth, turning it into a metaphysical conundrum: If a crooked line connecting two points is extended beyond the points infinitely in both directions, and the projected line were somehow to remain entirely within the observer's purview, would the crooks still be evident? (I concluded that they would not.)
The "observer" I had in mind for this analogy was a superhuman being with the ability to see beyond the limits of finite perception, and my conclusion was based on speculation that an infinite perspective would overlook the minutia of finite existence. The fallacy in my reasoning was not that my hypothetical linear projection would still have a beginning and an end—I was fully aware that infinity has no limits—but rather that a perspective capable of surveying a line so long as to be unending would necessarily "miss" the finite variants, reducing the perceived image to a straight line, just as a rural road with minor windings appears as a straight line on a conventional roadmap.
As finite observers, we mortals can't see the micro-world of cells and molecules unless we employ a microscope that reveals such details. An infinite being would of course be expected to possess unlimited or absolute sensibility without visual aids. Yet, if we apply the simple mathematical theory of limits to this concept, letting N represent any finite value, it would seem that Finitude (sector A-B in the "roadmap") disappears from the perspective of an infinite [absolute] observer. Thus, Fig. 1 represents the individual's perspective of the finite sector.
Since the perspective of a single (human) observer has a mathematical value that is equivalent to Finitude, it is represented as the dividend N/α divided by the Finitude observed. In this case, the Ns cancel out, converting to unity divided by Infinity, and the resulting quotient is a magnitude approaching mathematical nothingness but obviously large enough to support a perspective capable of scanning the finite sector. To express the infinite perspective, we simply divide the whole of Infinity [α] by Finitude [N], which eliminates the observed Finitude while essentially leaving Infinity intact, as seen in Fig. 2.
Now except for the loss of the finitude factor in both examples, these simple equations prove nothing, since mathematical values are valid only within the scope of finite dimensions. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that such constructs tend to support the metaphysical precept that, depending on the perspective of the observer, finitude either "disappears" or shrinks to near nothingness (infinitesimilitude) when compared with infinity.
This mathematical anomaly did not escape the attention of Pascal, who referred to it rhetorically in his principal philosophical work, Pensées, introducing the notion of infinitesimilitude as the
hypothetical basis for a single-point universe: "Do you believe it to be impossible that God is infinite, without parts? Yes. I wish therefore to show you an infinite and indivisible thing. It is a point moving everywhere with an infinite velocity; for it is one in all places and is all totality in every place." An appreciation of this concept will, I think, be helpful in understanding the role of nothingness in the Creation hypothesis to follow.
The idea that I have tried to impart from this exercise is that, notwithstanding the assumed omniscience of an absolute observer, in the strictly mathematical sense finitude amounts to virtually nothing. Inasmuch as an individual's physical organism and lifespan are finite, he or she is essentially an infinitesimal point in the whole of Essence. Man lives in the present; he is aware of himself and the world here and now. Discounting memory and anatomical measurements, the point at which these space/time coordinates intersect defines the ultimate unit of awareness. Because the mode of experience is "serialized" in time and movable in space, awareness is always changing. Like Pascal's infinitesimal moving point, existential awareness is significant only in terms of the overall conscious image it describes. But even when extended to include the full duration and occupied space of our finite lifetime, its "magnitude" approximates the nothingness that delineates the myriad "crooks and turns" of our experience.
Although hidden in our space/time cognizance of the world, nothingness is as "real" as any of the entities it defines. If we are aware of it at all, it is as empty space—the "vacuum" that Pascal needed to confirm empirically as proof for the existence of metaphysical nothingness. But however it is conceived, nothingness is the "differential factor" that separates the sensible phenomena of our finite world from the insensient reality that we are denied as differentiated creatures. We use nothingness to tune-in and grasp the objective symbols of reality and add them to the stream of images that constitute our reality experience. Man is the metaphysical "not-other" or negate in a reality of "otherness". As individuals, we participate in this other and taste of its Essence, but our cognizant awareness is not indigenous to it. If it were, we would not be subject to birth and death, and our experience would not consist of a multiplicity of things and events that change from day to day.
In nature man is a mortal creature whose physical world is a finite illusion induced by fragmental awareness of the Essence that surrounds and engulfs him. Orientalist Alan Watts once compared our view of the Absolute to that of someone unfamiliar with animals who, peering through a narrow fence slot as a cat walks by, describes the observation as "a head with whiskers and ears, followed immediately by a larger body, and lastly by a tail." His point, of course, was that our finite panorama of reality unfolds as a sequence of events separated by nothingness. The nothingness interrupting this sequence is due to the limitations of our sensibility, causing us to break down the Essence of reality into the conscious awareness of many parts distributed throughout a three-dimensional universe. Distinctions and differences have their source in the discontinuity and serialization of sensory experience and are not intrinsic to Essence itself which is absolute and constant in its Oneness.
Recall that the "what" of a thing is its essence. What we call "existence" is really Essence carved out by nothingness. It is not part of Essence but it is "essential" in creating the appearance of being. The essence of any contingent (non-necessary) being is its potential to exist. It becomes an actual existent not by virtue of its nature or essence, but by virtue of an "act" that it receives—the act of existing—and this act is objectively the differentiation of Essence by nothingness.
Nothingness is the cosmic differentiator that reduces potentiality to actuality. But what has the potential to exist is not actualized by its own power, for prior to existence there is no "itself", but rather by virtue of an other whose essence is the necessity to exist. Not only is it impossible for a man to bring himself into being, it is also just as impossible for him to sustain his existence. Whatever he does, he can only do on condition that he exist—feed himself, for example. We keep ourselves alive, but we do not preserve our existence. We need to be before we can keep ourselves alive. We bring the appearance of objects into subjective reality by framing them in nothingness, but we cannot bring them into being from nothing; we can only act according to the powers of our nature, within the limits of that nature; and since existence is not an essential part of man's nature, the human act of negating (differentiating) objects and events does not alone give them being.
But there is more to cognizant sensibility than objective reality. The values of which man is made sensible transcend the delimiting "slots" in his awareness, indicating that values are not mere "of-the-moment" feelings but derivatives of an eternal Essence for which objective reality only provides a temporary blueprint. Considering the essential source of value and the fact that value discrimination is idiosyncratic of human beings, it could be argued that the capacity to realize (and interpret) value is at least as important as "the ability to reason" in defining man's existence. Indeed, it is in realizing the Value of Essence that the individual comes closest to experiencing immortality.
What we are really "latching onto" in our daily contact with otherness is the value of Essence gathered up incrementally, "piecemeal fashion", by the five neuro-receptive faculties of our physiological organism, and consciously configured as discrete entities in time and space. But even before these symbols of reality can be converted to cognitive intelligence, the individual must be value-oriented; that is, he or she must be predisposed to realize Value in the experience of otherness. This necessitates a priori division of self-awareness from Essence; so that, paradoxically, it is nothingness that not only separates us from absolute reality but that makes possible our experience of the finite world.
Cosmologists have traditionally viewed Creation as a cataclysmic event, or series of events, occurring at some time in the distant past (most recently estimated as 13.7 billion years ago) which is thought to designate the origin, if not the cause, of the universe. According to the physical laws of thermodynamics, the universe is causally bound to a finite history that runs its course from the alpha of creation to the omega of entropy.
This concept poses a number of logical contradictions. For example, even if it were conceded (for hypothetical purposes) that time existed before there was anyone to sense its passing or any event to measure it by (not to mention what happens to it after entropy), there remains the ex nihilo fallacy—the physical impossibility of something arising out of nothing. Although a few cosmologists still subscribe to the theory of a steady-state universe with no beginning, or a multi-dimensional "parallel universe" system, either of which arguably might circumvent these problems, the prevailing theory specifically places the start of everything at the moment of the Big Bang—a cosmic explosion which, compounding the flawed logic, is usually explained as the result of a "critical energy mass".
In the philosophy of Essence, laws and theories are accepted as constructs of the human reasoning process which do not necessarily reflect the true nature of reality. For the Essentialist, the predicates "to be" and "to ex-ist" are derivatives of an "uncreated" Essence whose reality transcends the parameters of finite existence. If Essence is a priori, and existence is limited to phenomena that occur in time and space, then it is illogical to say that Essence exists. Essence is the infinite Source of finite experience, not an existent. (Aristotle rejected the "Infinite" as an existing reality on the premise that a whole number cannot be infinite because one can never actually count to infinity.) Thus the Essentialist is not compelled to regard Creation as a specific "act" or "physical happening" in time and space. Instead, he views space/time existence as a perceived reduction of Absolute Essence that is largely the product of his differentiated perspective of otherness.
Let me say at the outset that this hypothesis is by no means an attempt to outline the complex dynamics of physical and biological creation; I have neither the academic credentials nor the allotted space for such an undertaking. In fact, it isn't even desirable, within the scope of this exposition, that the reader come away with a comprehensive understanding of creation in the historical or evolutionary sense. Nor will I waste the reader's time arguing for the necessity of a "primary cause" which, to anyone in search of ultimate truth, will be patently obvious. My aim here is simply to posit an original cosmology that, hopefully, will account for the major constituents of experiential existence while showing that "process" is, in reality, an objectivized perspective of the ineffable nature or Value of the absolute Source.
We've observed that objects come into existence by assuming perceptible qualities, that is, by their being separated or differentiated from a primary source. In the tradition of Occam's razor, as there is no reason to presuppose an antecedent, I identify the a priori source as Essence and I attribute it directly to the Absolute Whole which, by the traditional religio-philosophical parameters, is characterized as "uniform, unchanging and limitless". Although Essence is incomprehensible from the finite perspective, one may logically infer that Essence is "uncreated", which eliminates creatio ex nihilo as well as the infinite regression of prior causes. But any attributive description of the Absolute eludes the power of logic. So the question for ontology is: How do we get from the immovable absolute to the transitional relative?
In an obscure essay on mysticism, Andrey Smirnov of the Department of Oriental Philosophy at Russia's Academy of Sciences, explains how the mystics of Europe and Islam got around the inadequacy of definitions in describing a divinity or primary cause. "The mystics understood the indefinableness of God in a far wider sense than did other medieval philosophers and thinkers. Indefinableness, as the mystics put it, traverses the limits of the indefinable in the sense of Aristotelian logic. For anything to be indefinable per genus et differentiam does not exclude at all the possibility of description, and description is, of course, stating something definite about the thing described. But the indefinableness of God in a mystical sense comes in fact to be indefiniteness; that is, it rules out any definite proposition about the Divine essence. Any such proposition means a sort of limitation imposed on the Divine, while the latter is incompatible with any limit. The ontological unlimitedness of God entails for a mystic an epistemological indefiniteness: any assertion about God would then be only metaphorical and would not serve as an established basis of knowledge."9
Faced with these descriptive limitations, Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464] developed a theory based on the "not-other" as a symbolic connotation for God. Cusa argues that, although God is indefinable, it can be stated that the world is not God but is not anything other than God. In Nicholas’ own words: "The first principle cannot be other either than an other or than nothing and likewise is not opposed to anything." God is "not other", he asserts, because God is not other than any [particular] other, even though "not-other" and "other" [once derived] are opposed. But no other can be opposed to God from whom it is derived. The significance of Cusa's theory is profound. It has afforded philosophers a most valuable metaphysical tool—namely, a definition for the ineffable Source whose attributive nature is indefinable.
Professor Clyde Miller of Stony Brook University's Philosophy Department has formalized Cusa's theory as a logical proposition: "For any given non-divine X, X is not other than X, and X is other than not X. What is unique about the divine not other is precisely that it is not other than either X or not X ('cannot be other than'—'is not opposed to anything'). The transcendent not-other thus undercuts both the principles of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle."10 The simple analogy of an ordinary drinking glass may help us understand the Cusan not-other. The inside of the glass is not its outside, and the outside is not its inside; yet, at the same time the glass is not other than either of its sides. Not-other is the coincidence of all otherness, including nothingness and contrariety.
One of the corollaries of Cusa's theory is the concept of "actualized possibility", or what he called possest, a combination of the Latin posse, [able, possible] and esse, [being, actualization]. Cusa reasoned that if actuality did not exist, then nothing could actually be. But the being of things is what we call existence. Things appear; therefore actuality exists. Possibility and actuality are co-dependent in existence but coincide in the non-contradictory Source—ultimate reality in which opposites like 'positive/negative' and 'being/nothing' are equivalent. If the possibility of contradictory otherness is always present in Essence and becomes actualized when there is an awareness to experience it, then it is this actualization that we call existence. (If you are wondering what happens to Essence when there is no awareness to experience it, you need reminding that time is an intellectual construct of the human mind which experiences events sequentially, while Creation is a timeless constant.)
Another way of understanding Cusa's concept of actualized contrariety is to realize that every existent is definable both positively (in terms of what it is) and negatively (in terms of what it is not). For example, a triangle constructed from three connecting lines may be conceived as having two contradictory forms—the one defined by the space contained within the lines, and the other formed by the space outside the lines. Neither conception alters the definition of a triangle. Thus, Essence, which is defined as "all that is", is the equivalent of the "nothing that is not." So that, even from the finite perspective, Essence can be conceived as both absolute potentiality and absolute actuality without contradiction. Since negation does not alter the absolute source, it is manifested as a dichotomy of nothingness and being, which is the appearance of differentiated existence.
Of course any relational expression of Essence is inadequate for the reason that Essence is absolute and non-relational. However, we can identify the actualized elements of Essence as they appear in existence. Considered metaphysically, actualized existence is a triad constituted of Beingness, Nothingness, and Sensibility. Nothingness is a negate which doesn't exist but is still functional in the triad. According to the law of contradiction, if one element of the triad stands alone, the other two elements are in contradictory identity. Thus, if Nothingness is negated from Essence, Beingness and Sensibility are left as the contradictory essents, an essent being an actualized product of creation. This forms a subject/object duality in which Being is made sensible as the subjective awareness of an objective essent —"otherness". As the lone non-contradictory element, Nothingness becomes the ground of physical reality, dividing Sensibility into the multiplicity of awareness-selves and differentiating otherness into the finite beings and events of an insentient universe.
Such reasoning was not unknown to Plotinus and Eckhart whose teachings were the basis for Cusan logic, but it was the mystical tradition that gave the concept of a "negated other" logical credibility as a creational thesis. What distinguished the mystics was their close linking of these two assertions. I find it surprising that Western philosophers have shown little interest in a not-other ontology and have virtually ignored a negational source as the primary cause. The rationale for negation is quite simply that any created thing is a lesser entity than the whole. Since the objects of creation are secondary and inferior to the undifferentiated whole, they can arise only by negation of the whole.
There is but one plausible hypothesis to account for the creation of a dynamic, multiplistic universe from a constant, absolute source: viz., Essence is negational. Because Essence is absolute and ubiquitous, there is no other within or beside it. Therefore, in order to create an other, it "invents" one by denying itself. How is it possible for an absolute source to step back from itself, as it were, and actualize something else? First of all, the modus operandi for the creation of an otherness is abnegation or "self-denial", rather than action or movement. Like the mountain climber who has ascended to the highest summit and for whom further progress can only be descent, Absolute Essence is the only entity that creates by "exclusion". The potential for actualizing the appearance of contrariety (difference) is innate in its Oneness. And because negation is the potentiality of Essence, which itself is primary, the cause and the source of creation are one. So that what is perceived by the creature to be "evolutionary process" in time and space is in reality a fait accompli of the immutable Creator—a metaphysical modality representing what Absolute Essence itself is not; i.e., differentiated otherness.
Johannes [Meister] Eckhart seems to have been drawn to the concept of a negational Creator, since it appears as a recurrent theme in the doctrines he taught as a Dominican prefect in medieval Germany. Although bound to the theology of the Church, this extraordinary gnostic had an intuitive grasp of metaphysical reality and was not afraid to explain it in common everyday terms that eventually led to charges of religious heresy. I like to think of Eckhart as the first "theological" Essentialist. In this mini-sermon, for example, having defined God as "...undivided and One in essence", he proceeds to discuss what is clearly an allusion to "creation by negation":
The divine One is a negation of negations. Every creature contains a negation: one denies that it is the other. [Even] an angel denies that it is any other creature; but God contains the denial of denials: He is the One who denies of every other that he is anything except himself .11
Like Plotinus, Eckhart's Creator is a unitary Essence whose "absolute fullness" overflows into a differentiated "otherness" that we call existence. But, as Raymond Blakney mentions in his translator's notes, Eckhart was "...unwilling that God should be defined by the name man gives him", instead coining the term "istigkeit" which appeared in varied Germanic spellings throughout The Sermons and was evidently found objectionable by the Inquisition. That Blakney chose to anglicize this term to "is-ness", as in the passage "God's is-ness is my is-ness", increases the likelihood that Eckhart wished to convey an idea of the Creator's essentiality that would avoid the common notion of finite being which, as he correctly surmised, is "derived from another". Given Eckhart's choice of Essence to characterize the nature of his unified deity, and allowing "nothingness" to transect finitude by time and space, we see that an ontology is possible in which negation is the primary cause of existence. Keep in mind that, as Cusa's "first principle", Essence opposes nothing; otherness is therefore its negated object. Only by the negation of Essence is an antithetical otherness conceivable.
My Creation hypothesis is based in part on the Cusan premise that the world "is not anything other than God", which suggests a negational [not-other] Essence. Because Essence is absolute in potentiality and contains no otherness, what it negates (or denies) in actuality must also be absolute. There is but one possible option: Nothingness. As the antithetical essent, only nothingness shares the absolute and undivided status of Essence. What Essence actualizes as an "other" is its negative or Nothingness potentiality. This negation of Nothingness creates difference—that is, it actualizes Sensibility in contradiction to Being. In humanistic terms, negation is a denial—in the first instance, the denial of nothingness. Nothingness literally means "not anything"—the absence of existential being—which is why I refer to it as the "negate". Nothingness does not exist, either in Essence or in physical reality, because Essence negates it. Negation is not a singular event but, rather, an inferred characteristic of Essence that is reflected in the actualized nothingness that differentiates and defines "beingness" and sensibility in existence. Eckhart's teachings support this hypothesis: "To create is to give being out of nothing," he says.
Philosophy scholars will note that my thesis is loosely modeled on Hegelian "double negation". Although Hegel based his primary source on Being rather than Essence, he postulated that it is negated—that is, reflected in an image or "recognized"—which implies subjective cognizance of an objective "other". He went on to explain that this reflection of Being "turns out to be appearance", but its appearance is also "the proximate truth of [Essence]" in the sense that it contains Essence in an objective form. The (inward) negation of Essence is manifested in its (outward) appearance, and the completion of this identity between inward and outward is Actuality. Thus, according to Hegel, Appearance is the negation of the negation of Being, whereas Actuality is the negation of the negation of Essence.
When Hegel says that appearance is "the negation of the negation of Being," he is alluding to a secondary negation—one performed by the negated self, as opposed to the primary negation which is the negation or denial of nothingness that actualizes existence. Value can be perceived only when it exists as an other to the perceiver, that is to say, when Essence is actualized. The experience of an object is the result of the appearance of being negated from undifferentiated otherness by the negate. This secondary negation releases the essent's being-value to the negate (awareness). In other words, the appearance of being is a reduction of essent-value relative to a particular being or object. Experience is the process of appropriating essent-value for oneself and objectifying the being that this value represents. Before we explore the value connection to this cosmology, it may be useful to look at the complementarity or differentiating potential of negation from another perspective.
The Israeli art critic and author Tsion Avital relates the paradox of double-negation, as developed by philosophers, to the oppositional nature of negated existence that makes subjective affirmation possible. According to Professor Avital, negation-affirmation is the necessary condition for "the structural shadows of mind-reality" for which he has coined the term 'mindprints'. Here is a sampling of the artist's inspired thoughts, modestly expressed, from an essay on symmetry and asymmetry:
The wonder of Creation is perhaps the wonder of the creation of negation. Everything else is derived from it. The first verses of Genesis describe the first distinctions that God made, which are also the creation of the first complementary pairs: heaven-earth, light-darkness, etc., but no distinction is possible without negation, and negation and double negation therefore preceded all distinctions that followed. For the same reason complementarity too, which was generated by negation, preceded the complementary pairs that were created. Actually, the first Asymmetry, which according to the Big Bang theory is the moment of creation, could not be without negation. In a humorous vein, one might suggest a different opening for the first chapter of the Bible: In the beginning God was very bored amidst Perfect Symmetry, in which absolutely nothing happened. Then accidentally He sighed, "Oh No!" This created the first Asymmetry, which brought into being the other mindprints...and the rest is History. In other words, there is no symmetry without asymmetry, and there is no asymmetry without negation; therefore negation is a precondition for Symmetry-Asymmetry, and the same can be shown with regard to all the other mindprints. In a final regression, the negation of negation is perhaps what created Being, and this is perhaps the significance of the proposition that Being was created from nothingness. There is nothing new about this, since the idea already arose in the creation myths and in philosophy, in Western and Eastern cultures, and also in modern physics. ...Not only is epistemology impossible without negation and double negation, but neither is ontology possible without this mindprint. That is to say, there is no Being at all levels without its complementary opposite, nonbeing or nothingness. In both cases, in the noetic world and also in the material world, negation creates otherness
: it splits unity and simplicity and thus creates diversity and complexity12 Sometimes a simple anecdote can help us understand the meaning of oxymorons like "negation of negation". When Michelangelo was asked how he was able to sculpt his masterpiece 'The David', he is said to have replied: "Creating The David was easy—all I had to do was remove all that was not David from the stone." Think of nothingness as the chisel we use to carve out all that is not finite being from absolute Essence. Just as in the logic of morality two 'wrongs' don't make a 'right', in the logic of metaphysics two 'negatives' don't make a 'positive'; they make a dichotomy. When an entity negated by Essence negates, it creates the appearance of being—the dichotomy otherwise known as being-aware. This dichotomy differentiates sensibility and makes it proprietary to the individual organism. So, from here on out, we will be using the term "proprietary awareness" for organic sensibility, leaving Absolute Sensibility as an inferred synonym for Essenc
